Tea-party-affiliated ophthalmologist Dan Eichenbaum said late Sunday he would not file to run for Congress in North Carolina's 11th district.

In a statement to supporters, he wrote, "Over the past several months of the campaign, listening to the other candidates for Congress in NC 11, I find increasingly little difference, on paper or in words, between the positions I have consistently held and theirs."

"More importantly, I am unable to self-fund sufficiently to compete against those who can. As such, I see no clear path to victory in the primary," he added.

In a short interview with Roll Call early today, Eichenbaum confirmed he wasn't going to file and said he didn't expect to endorse any of the other candidates in the competitive primary.

Eichenbaum won 34 percent of the vote in the 2010 Republican primary for the district.

Real estate investor Mark Meadows, businessman Ethan Wingfield, local district attorney Jeff Hunt and others are locked in a race for the GOP nomination in the open district currently represented by retiring Rep. Heath Shuler (D).